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Question: What is the deadliest conflict since World War II? I’ll give you a hint: it was pretty recent. Give up? Most won’t get it right. Most don’t even know it happened. Because the world doesn’t give a shit about Africa. But in 1998 began what some would come to call the Great War of Africa, or even the African World War.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 2, 1998--
It’s more accurate to refer to it as the Second Congo War, beginning a year after the end of the first one. The war involved nine countries and 25 armed groups. The war was largely funded by the sale of conflict minerals. Being that over five million people died in the war, take that shit about not buying such things seriously.
The roots of the conflict can be found in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Actually, wait. Back up. The real roots of it arose from a century of getting fucked over by European colonialism, raping an entire continent and created long-lasting enmity via divide and conquer. Then it was about Tutsis running Rwanda being pissed that Hutus, in what was then called Zaire, raiding their country. So Rwanda, with help from Uganda and Angola invaded Zaire and helped install a puppet leader named Kabila in the spring of 1997, who renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Congolese didn’t like how Kabila was a total puppet and also hated having all these Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers in their country, so Kabila found a spine and said hey thanks for helping make me president, but get the fuck out. That did not go over well, and Rwanda invaded on August 2, 1998.
And then fucking everyone got involved. Based on that whole “enemy of my enemy is my friend” crap, alliances formed and the murderfest began. What followed was a five-year-long fucktacular shitnado of ass, with rampant killing via AK-47s and machetes alike. There was also what Human Rights Watch called “a war within a war,” because hundreds of thousands of women were brutally raped. And this rape was not a by-product of the war, but an intentional military strategy—a weapon used against the civilian population.
Much more death resulted from disease and starvation, and while the war officially ended in 2003, malnutrition and sickness continued to claim a thousand lives a day in the chaos that followed. The new state formed following the peace agreement is pretty fucking useless, and violence and abuse continues.
In the West, we barely noticed because the region is not “strategically important” like, say, the Middle East. Africans killing each other is something that few people outside Africa care about.
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